Innovation management and assessment

A recent survey on innovation management in major French companies confirms the difficulty companies have in quantitatively measuring innovation performance. Yet this measurement is essential to justify and motivate the profitability of investments in R&D and in the management of innovative ideas and projects.

We suggest that you analyze your company's innovation performance, or consider supplementing "rear-view mirror" indicators with indicators of future innovation capacity.

For "rear-view mirror" type indicators, i.e. those that measure past performance and are therefore a priori observable, we propose a series of 25 typical indicators (without being limitative). These indicators are classified into major families, synonymous with the same number of measurement purposes:

• research and development productivity ;

• processing efficiency (including the rate of transfer to the market) ;

• Research and Development effort and contribution to the company's added value ;

• efficiency of Research and Development processes (in the sense of management control) ;

• efectiveness of open innovation ;

• quality of innovation perceived by the customer.

For all the proposed indicators, the aim is to identify which ones are used regularly and systematically in your company, and whether or not they really measure – from the company's point of view – innovation performance.